A Heckler Makes A Good Point

The first comment on the Seeking Alpha version of my Hugh Hendry post asked why anyone should care about my opinion about someone else's opinion with the someone else being Hendry. This was amusing on a couple of levels because why should anyone care about anyone's opinion about anything?

Personally speaking I apparently love to learn new things. This applies to my day job (managing money) and my involvement with our fire department. Learning plays a large role in both--no one knows it all.

The bigger question raised by the heckler is what value is gained by taking in opinions of other people? The answer is different for each of us. Long time readers may recall my belief in taking little bits of process from various sources to create your own process. Three big influences for me have been Jim Stack on defensive action, John Hussman on thinking in terms of cycles and Ken Fisher on the importance of foreign investing. Each of the three do things I don't agree with too.

If I agreed with everything one of them did I would just be copying them which is not necessarily bad but it would not be my own process.

Hendry is interesting as are a lot of people we read about from time to time and so for people who are interested in opinions from people and even opinions of opinions there can be value in attempting to dissect what some like Hendry is saying or value in trying to understand the contra argument for what Hendry is saying so as to better decide what role, if any, Hendry's thought process should play in what you do.

I agree with Hendry about Japan having serious problems, I mentioned this countless times here, but my preference is to simply avoid it.

Wednesday New Zealand time we started going to the Fox Glacier (top picture) and then on to Franz Josef which is another glacier and the second picture. There was a short little hike at each one. We then did a lot of driving through gold country (there are several towns that have gold mining histories including Ross where we had lunch. We stopped for a mocha in Hokitika then kept going to Greymouth where I visited with the fire department for about 20 minutes to try to learn a little about what they do, how they train and what their calls are like and I they gave me their fire patch which is a pretty neat one. We took pictures at several other FDs along the way. They are all "volunteer brigades" but the station in Greymouth is the big one in the region.

We then went through Arthur's Pass to get to Christchurch. This was steep country going up over the pass and it was raining the whole time with some fog but made it just fine. Downtown Christchurch looks wartorn from the quake that was exactly one year ago--we actually had trouble finding a place to stay because so many people came in to commemorate the anniversary.

Today we are headed to Mount Cook.